Welcome to the WIRE Differently podcast where we chat all about how to best support exceptional children.

I'm your host, Holly Blanc Moses, the mom psychologist who gets it.

Thank you, Eric Zimmerman, for joining us today, the founder and technical director at the Buddy Project.

And Eric, you've also written two e-books on what it's like to be on the spectrum.

And you've also toured all around the world educating parenting groups on autism.

So thank you for joining me today.

Yes, anytime.

I appreciate it.

So you and I were chatting and we were talking about

how it feels to be autistic and understanding

what that means for social differences.

And for my patients, I'm not autistic, but for my patients, I know just developing and maintaining

and understanding those social relationships can be overwhelming and difficult at some time.

So I appreciate you coming on and talking about your own experience. So are you ready to

just jump in? Yes. All right, let's do it. So when my patients are younger and what I often see is that,

you know, when they're very young, there's a lot of parallel play and a lot of active play. So there's

not a lot of back and forth, kind of active play. So there's not a lot of back

and forth, kind of this talking back and forth, staying on topic, all these things that

kind of seem to be complicated later. But when things do change, when they get a little bit

older, you find that it's just a lot more complicated. So what was your experience as far as being younger? And do you remember

when it was easier to play with friends? I've only had one true friend and he was in middle school

and in high school. We're still friends today, but of course he has his own life and, you know, he had a job and a girlfriend.

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